The Industry Consumer Advisory Forum (ICAF) has called for stakeholders’ collaboration with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) towards improving the Quality of Service (QoS) delivery by in the country.
The advocacy group stated this during a presentation made at its first quarter 2020 meeting held in Abuja.
At every meeting of ICAF, a corporate member is required to make a presentation about a topical issue in the sector. At this meeting, the Association of Licensed Telecoms Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) made the presentation focused on challenges of quality of service delivery in telecoms sector.
In the presentation, ICAF noted that the challenge of poor QoS in the telecom industry is an issue that requires collaborative efforts of the National Assembly as well as state and local governments to tackle; while noting the urgency and necessity.
It stated that telecoms has long migrated from being a mere enabler of communication to an industry that is widely acknowledged as the most enabler of socio-economic activities in contemporary society.
However, the telecommunications sector has its own peculiar challenges that impedes the quality of service by telecom operators.
These include infrastructure damage, bombed sites due to insurgent activities, illegal site lock-outs, unstable power supply and prolonged power outage, denial of statutory permits for infrastructure roll-out, high cost of Right of Way (RoW), and use of substandard devices by the consumers, among others.
Also, failure of some governmental authorities and their agencies to grant the statutory approvals required by operators to build more sites is another problem.
“As the existing infrastructure get to full capacity, operators need to build more facilities to accommodate excess call, SMS, data and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) traffic. Unfortunately, in the past seven years, the FCT Administration, in particular, has not granted approvals for telecommunications sites to be built in the Territory.”
The group stated that NCC has been doing a lot to get the buy-in of all relevant stakeholders to address some these challenges, but not much inroad has been recorded because not all stakeholders in the ecosystem are fully supporting the regulator’s efforts at addressing these issues in order to ensure that telecom consumers get top-notched services.”
“…If we all agree that telecoms is central to our socio-economic development, then the NCC’s efforts need to be supported by all stakeholders, especially the National Assembly through the passage of the Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) Bill and; we at ICAF also urge the state governors to be considerate about policy measures in order to encourage massive deployment of telecoms infrastructure in their states, as being championed by the NCC,” ICAF said.
